–Our next radio show will be Tuesday night, March 15th @ 8pm central.You can listen live here or at your convenience later in archive form on ITunes, here or at that same link.

—Ben Smith is now riding a four-game goal streak, posting five goals in that span.Rockford beat Hamilton 2-1 in a shootout on Wednesday night.Brandon Pirri sealed the win in the shootout after Jeff Taffe and Smith also converted in the breakaway skills session.

Rockford will close out their 7-game road trip Friday night in Milwaukee.They return home on Sunday afternoon to face the Chicago Wolves.Its the Wolves final visit to MetroCentre this season.

The IceHogs have won five of their last eight games (4-3 on the road).They’d gone three months without going to a shootout before having them in back-to-back games this week and splitting the outcomes.Hannu Toivonen has a .948 save percentage over his last six appearances.

–I’ll be doing a Rockford Q&A in post-form here on the site this Monday.For whatever reason I’ve been receiving a lot more IceHogs’ and prospect related emails than usual of late.Typically I get those when the Hawks aren’t doing well or the IceHogs or individual prospects catch fire.Anyway, I’ve responded to just about every one already person-to-person, but since so many were particularly thoughtful queries, I figured we’d put it up for everyone to read.I’ve seen more IceHogs’ hockey this season than is probably good for my health, so I can help you with just about anything crossing your mind concerning that team. So, if there’s any IceHogs’ topics or questions you would like discussed, email those to me by Sunday morning and I’ll include any that aren’t already covered.Continue reading »

A special Friday afternoon edition of TheThirdManIn~Radio today. Dieter Kurtenbach joins me to break down the Jack Skille-Michael Frolik trade piece by piece. We also have a long discussion and share our take on the process of how trade rumors take a life of their own, the true villains in the process and the relationship between main stream or professional reporters, amateurs, hobbyists, pretenders and the general audience. That and so much more.

— Michael Frolik not so “versatile” after all
— Where newest Hawk fits best
— Comparisons to Kris Versteeg
— Michael Grosek (I resisted the Nikita Alexeev urge)
— Reflections of the Jack Skille Experience
— Will Skille score 20 in South Florida?
— The Skille-Chicago match
— Particular thing the trade didn’t accomplish
— Why Alexander Salak may have been available?
— What made Salak’s inclusion in this deal particularly strange
— Dale Tallon giving up on two 2006 1st rounder in 4 months
— Word on two Hawks’ recent goaltending draft picks
— Q, again, refusing to put his best lineup on the ice
— Perfect sense flying over Quenneville’s head
— Most important line in hockey
— Love for the Mike Fisher deal
— Some ideas for if the Blackhawks fall out of the chase
— Zach Bogosian not in play for Chicago
— A all of a sudden a web site has gone all Eklund on the Internet
— Hawks defense a sloppy mess even in victory
— Block predicts something & winds up wrong a few hours later (big shock)
— “I’ve pumped Steve Montador for a long time now” (Thanks SL)
— And so much more…..

Show returns Tuesday night, February 15th in our usual weekly time lot, 8pm central at BlogTalkRadio.com/TheThirdManIn. We say this frequently but somehow never get to it… However, we have received a lot of feedback for our last month of shows and we’ll read and answer some of those emails on Tuesday night. If you are a regular listener and have anything you’d like to hear addressed on this week’s show, send an email to the address below and I’ll do my best to get through as many as I can.